How-to writers

LLOYD December 06, 2008 12:58 pm

— You’d never tuck one in your bag to read at the beach.
It never appears on a year-end top-10 list. Oprah doesn’t invite the author to discuss it on her show.
Many people never even look at it.
The lowly instruction manual gets less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.
The reader glances at it while fitting tab A into slot B and fumbling for hardware packet C. Then it ends up crumpled in the trash with the coffee grounds.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy to write. Explaining construction or operation steps is an exacting process requiring precision and discipline and command of language.
A senior English class at Greenup County High School is learning that the hard way, by writing instruction manuals themselves.
They are building small robots and then crafting instructions to guide future builders through the assembly steps.
The catch is that they aren’t graded entirely on their teacher’s judgment. Science students in another class will build the robots using the instructions.
Instruction that proves confusing will lower the grade.
A National Science Foundation grant made the technical writing project possible. That in itself is unusual since the grant funded an English project, said teacher David Deborde.
Writing the manuals was a challenging exercise in paring prose down to the bare essentials. As English students, they’re more accustomed to creative writing and essays.
“Technical writing is more difficult. You have to have everything to a T,” said Lauren Latimer, one of the students. When she writes creatively, she can add details, she said.
Writing an instruction manual requires thinking like the builder, Kayla Hensley said. Opinion and elaboration are distractions at best.
“You just have to make it clear. It takes more time and thought.”
As Deborde put it, “The only purpose is to get from A to B ... Either they’ll understand it or they won’t.”
The class turned a nearby hallway into a track Friday to race the bots. The contest didn’t count, but because Deborde’s entry crawled over the line last, he bought the students lunch.
In the end, they gained a command over another genre that will assist them in writing essays, creative pieces and even poetry, Deborde said.
“If they’re good in one, they should be competent in another,” he said.
Deborde will get more mileage from his grant by passing the robots on to other classes. After the science students assemble them according to the instructions written by Deborde’s class, he will hand them off to the district’s elementary schools, which will use them for robotics studies.
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.

Photos

Toy robots race to the finish line Friday during a race by Dave Deborde's writing class. Putting the robots together was part of a technical writing exercise. The Independent